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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

When a National Academies panel was created last year to examine where to go next in life sciences, some thought it would focus on biomedicine—or merely ask for more money. So many science advocates were pleased last week when the panel called for a multidisciplinary initiative to address four major societal problems involving food, energy, the environment, and health. The report likens these goals to sending a man to the moon and the Human Genome Project.

Monday, September 28, 2009

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) has honored two researchers in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz with the 2009 Curt Stern Award. David Haussler, professor of biomolecular engineering, and James Kent, a research scientist in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, will accept the award on October 24 during the annual meeting of the ASHG in Honolulu.

Microsoft Research announced recently that Peer Bork, group leader in the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, will receive an award for his contributions to the advancement of science through the use of computational methods.

Bork was named Sept. 22 as the recipient of the fourth annual Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award, presented for his work to discover important relationships between the nature of the human microbiome—the union of all microorganisms that live in and around the human body—and various human parameters, such as age, ethnicity, diseases, nutrition, and genetics.

Bork's research is frequently being published in journals such as Nature, Science and Cell.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

"We think the system is going to fall apart of its own weight," says Thomas Leonard, a university librarian at UC Berkeley, about the traditional publishing system. Inside Higher Ed reports on a new development towards better support for Open Access journals:

On Monday, five leading universities announced a new "Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity" in which they have pledged to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions' scholars. In doing so, the institutions are attempting to put to rest the idea that only older publication models (paid and/or print) can support rigorous peer review and quality assurance.

The five universities that have joined the agreement so far are MIT, Harvard, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Dartmouth College.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

In "Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research" (published on September 15th in PLoS Biology) Peter A Lawrence offers his perspective on the challenges that many (early career) scientists are facing when trying to secure funding for their (first) lab or research group. He discusses the impact of the current system on careers and science itself and argues for a simplified system.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

This is an International Consortium of Stem Cell Networks (ICSCN) event hosted by Scottish Stem Cell Network. This international two day event has attracted some of the field's most prominent figures and will cover disease modelling in stem cells, cellular reprogramming and application of bioinformatics. URL: http://www.sscn.co.uk/Item.aspx?dept_id=138&item_id=225

Monday, September 14, 2009

The goal of the workshop is to bring together, for the first time, researchers developing and using visualization systems across all areas of biology, including genomics, sequence analysis, macromolecular structures, systems biology, and imaging (including microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging). We have assembled an authoritative list of 29 invited speakers who will present an exciting program, reviewing the state-of-the-art and perspectives in each of these areas. The primary focus will be on visualizing processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than on processing of raw data.

The workshop is limited in the total number participants, and each participant is normally required to present a poster and to give a 'fastforward' presentation about their work (limited to 30 seconds and 1 slide).

To apply to join the workshop, please go to http://vizbi.org and submit an abstract and image related to your work. Submissions close on 16 November 2009. Since places are limited, participants will be selected based on the relevance of their work to the goals of the workshop.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent within three weeks after the close of submissions.

We plan to award a prize for the submitted image that best conveys a strong scientific message in a visually compelling manner.

Please forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested. We hope to see you in Heidelberg next spring!

Seán O'Donoghue, EMBL

Jim Procter, University of Dundee

Nils Gehlenborg, European Bioinformatics Institute

Reinhard Schneider, EMBL

If you have any questions about the registration process please contact:

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

AMIA is now accepting abstract submissions to present at the 2010 Summit on Translational Bioinformatics, which will take place March 10-12 in San Francisco, CA. Submissions will be accepted on the AMIA website through September 24, 2009. For more information on this event or to download the Call for Participation please visit http://summit2010.amia.org.URL: http://summit2010.amia.org